Tag Archives: SEO

Why you need Content Marketing.

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In the year ahead, content marketing, in all its shapes and forms, is going to become a more integral component of ones digital marketing strategy – if it already has not been. The value of including content marketing in your strategy and optimizing it for all channels, is crucial to the success of your content, as well as growing your online footprint.

But before we go any further, you’re probably wondering what exactly content marketing is! That is a great question. *By definition, content marketing is a marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. Content marketing’s basic premise is to “provide some valuable information or entertainment – “content” – that stops short of a direct sales pitch or call to action, but which seeks to positively influence customers in some way. In layman’s terms, content marketing is the form of communicating with your target audience in a way where you deliver information that is educational in nature and helps them to make a more informed decision. Instead of selling, you’re helping your target audience become more intelligent.

Now that we have established the definition of content marketing, what exactly are forms of content marketing? Another great question! Some forms of content marketing include but are not limited to social media (Facebook, Linkedin, Google Plus), eNewsletters, articles, blogs, press releases, content marketing strategies
and more. All of these mediums can be used to reach out to target audiences and be used to build trust, educate, interact with customers, or drive conversions. As I mentioned above, content marketing is not about pitching your products, but more so about educating your target audience in effort to help them make a more informed buying decision.

Content marketing is an effective way to get your message in front of your target audience while persuading them to take action. And, I firmly believe that as more households continue to become multi-screen households (televisions, computers, tablets/smartphones), traditional advertisement will become less and less effective. I say this because consumers have become so immune to traditional advertisements that they do not even notice them or they scan right over them. For example, Internet users typically look right past Internet banner ads while “surfing,” television viewers can fast forward past commercials with DVR, making each of these advertising vehicles less effective as time goes on. You’re probably wondering how I know this. Well, a few years ago, I decided to take a sabbatical from internet marketing and try my hand at selling broadcast television advertising. It was there that I learned how television viewers watch television and what objections advertisers had about television advertising. And it was a very hard gig.

I am also a firm believer that if businesses utilize content marketing and marry it with other digital marketing efforts, they would see outstanding results (again, personal view). Why? Because content marketing is a vehicle where you can offer value to customers and clients with a consistent message of education and persuasion, which in return would ultimately reward your content marketing efforts by them becoming loyal patrons of your business or establishment.

You’re probably wondering by now if I am going to offer any tips that can help you develop a content marketing strategy. Well, below are some tips to help you develop a successful content marketing strategy.

  • Relevant, Ability to Share & Reusable: Develop content so it can be re-purposed down the road. The “blast and forget it” approach is not always the right approach. By giving your content a longer shelf life, you can help improve marketing efficiencies down the road. I want to mention that I am not recommending that you re-purpose the title and edit a few sentences. I am recommending that you use the same template, opening and closing paragraphs, and drop the new content in the middle.
  • Context of Content: Understand your target audience and deliver your message according to their interests. Develop a message that is going to resonate with them and prompt them to take action. Content and understanding your target audience is crucial to the success of your content marketing.
  • Adaptive: Again, make sure your content is consistent among all devices, as well provides the same user experience between computers, tablets, and smartphones.
  • Social Engagement: While developing your content, it’s important to ensure that your content is “social friendly” and it allows users to consume it, engage with it, and share it. This can help build and improve your social footprints.

I would like to leave you with this last thought before I jet. Content marketing will only continue to morph into a larger component of digital marketing and it’s important that you develop a content marketing strategy should you not have one.

*Definition courtesy of Wikipedia

Coming To Grips With Your Websites Content Strategy

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I’d like to take some time and focus on the content strategy for your companies website.  Why does website content seem to be an after thought for a lot of businesses?  It seems like a lot of businesses brush over the fact that their website actually needs to have a strong message and a valuable content strategy.  The content for your website needs to be able to drive a visitor to take some kind of desired action.  Whether that’s making a purchase, becoming a lead or coming into your business you want your visitors to feel like they can take that next action.  Websites can serve a variety of purposes, but for the most part businesses want to take their website visitors and turn them into customers.  So how do we do this?

Describe Your Products Or Services In Depth

I’m sure you have more to say about your business than you think.  No matter if you are a local business or a Fortune 500 company.  I would bet that you could expand the content on your website or make it better.  If your website is on the smaller side then you need to think of each product or service that you offer as a unique page on your website that is completely dedicated to that product or service. A lot of times I’ve spoken with companies who think a single page on their website labeled “Services” is going to list out and describe all the different things their company offers.  You should really push yourself to consider more than 1 services page as a general role of thumb.

If your website is on the larger side then you should have more resources and offer more, which means more pages and a larger site.  Don’t just think too that the answer is always adding more pages just to get your page count up.  You always want to approach content by adding value to your website visitors.  Larger websites can do much more with their content and add even more value by evaluating a larger content strategy.  If you need more ideas think about developing content then think about playing the recency card.  Develop something timely that is relevant to your audience.

Blogging For Your Business

Blogging is a great way for anyone to develop content on an ongoing basis very easily.  Blogs present unique opportunities to create interaction with your audience whenever someone comments on your post, and posts are often shared more often than other standard website pages.  Most of the time your blog posts are ordered by date, but you can also do things like assign categories and tags to your posts it often makes it easier for users to navigate to the content they are looking for.  Most people think that writing for a blog is either too much work, or that they aren’t going to be able to come up with new ideas for posts.  Here is just a small list of content ideas we’ve compiled over the years:

  • Changes or additions to your companies products or services.
  • Company or industry updates.
  • News that is relevant to your industry.
  • Discussing the most frequent problems that your customers bring up to your sales department or customer service department and develop answers to those questions.
  • Joining an internet community for your industry and blogging about topics that are presented often within that community.  Examples could be:
    • Social Media
    • Forums
    • Reddit

Developing Local Content

We work with a variety of local and regional clients that often come to us with this same problem about developing content relevant for their audience.  If you want to develop content or optimize content for a local audience think about how your business relates to those local consumers and integrate your web content with the interests of their local region.  Maybe you should start breaking out pages individually for each region you service and merge that content with how your company has serviced or been involved in that local community.  Work with a local journalist who reports on the area you service and help develop content that can be promoted on a local news outlet as well as your site.  Find local bloggers who live in your area that write content that supports your industry and present them with a guest blog post.

Ultimately Trying To Provide Value

At the end of the day whatever content you are producing with your website or for your company you need to be adding value to your visitors.  Also remember that you shouldn’t be running out of ideas.  Try to come up with creative pieces of web content that will help your audience and be pertinent to your business.

How SEO, PPC & Social Influence Each Other For Success

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Look out, the web is getting increasingly…webbier? What I mean is, no single marketing channel exists in a vacuum. Increasingly, different channels are relying on each other to further help push their own efforts. Truth is, that’s exactly how Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter and the other big players in search and social like it. The more signals they can get for your content, the better they are able to rank it, promote it, share it or even trash it.

In the early (good ole’) days of Google, links drove the majority of the relevance for a single piece of content in organic search results. Someone links to your page with the anchor text “discount shoes,” and Google counts that as one vote that your page should rank for a search for discount shoes. Simple, right? Now, a couple hundred factors influence where your page ranks in search results, including social signals—but we’ll more into that in a moment.

On the social front, Facebook and Twitter didn’t have much reach beyond their own domains. Then, the social graph was introduced, mapping out millions of pages and relationships on the web.

Today, SEO, PPC and social media are intertwined, and success in one channel can easily translate into success on another. In other words, without a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, you’re probably missing out.

How SEO Influences PPC

Someone asked me this question recently, which actually inspired this post. First, improving PPC performance can mean a number of things. Improved conversions, clicks, impressions, quality scores and lower CPCs can all be considered “wins” depending on your strategy and goals.

The first component is how SEO can improve your quality scores, which in turn leads to lower CPCs and higher average positions. Part of good SEO includes optimizing your entire website for a list of well-researched keywords and integrating primary pages well into the site. By choosing these well-optimized pages as landing pages for relevant keywords in your PPC ad groups, you can boost quality scores and positions while lowering your costs.

Also a key component of good SEO is eye-catching calls to action and easy site structure. These components can lower bounce rates and increase conversions, which are successes that translate into both SEO and PPC.

Lastly, it is important to keep in mind that SEO is the long term strategy and takes significant time and effort to build an effective presence in SERPs. When you’re still working your way up the organic rankings, PPC serves as the perfect short-term strategy for maintaining a presence on page 1 until your SEO efforts take over. Continue reading →

How To Build A Link Building Strategy To Fuel Your SEO

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Anyone who talks to you long enough about an SEO strategy will surely bring up inbound links and how important they are to your website’s organic rankings.  This is surely one of the most important aspects to your SEO strategy and something that a lot of people leave off or don’t put enough intentional effort into, because it’s usually the most time consuming and challenging part of doing SEO.  Something I believe that everyone needs to realize is that no two companies are going to successfully implement the same link building strategy and see the same results.  Your business and your website have very unique and great things about it, and those are the things you should really try to leverage when putting together a link building strategy.

What does your business do best?

The size of your business may be one of the first things you should realize and take into account.  A small regional company is not going to be able to build the same kinds of links as a large, national or global company with a very powerful brand.  When you’re putting together your link building strategy, think about what differentiates your company, or what assets you have that make you worth linking to.  Also think about what assets you can repurpose into a content strategy or another asset to attract links from other people on the web.  Try asking yourself these questions:

  • Do you have great content you can provide in a blog format that will draw links into your website?
  • Do you have any research data or statistics you can repurpose into an infographic?
  • Does your company have a great web based tool that you can give to users for free that they can embed on their website that links back to your website?
  • Are there any strong relationships you have with owners of other websites or writers in your industry that you can reach out to acquire additional links to your website?
  • What industry organizations or associations are you a part of?  It doesn’t matter if these are local or national.  A lot of businesses receive links from local chamber of commerce websites in their area.

Hopefully these questions have helped jog some ideas in your head and will help you start to put together the base elements of a strategy.  If your mind was blank when asked all of these questions, then you might have a little further to go before you can start to put together a useful link building strategy.

What’s working for your competitors?

Some other ideas to help you get started might be to look at your competitors.  A lot of initial tasks that I do when putting together link building strategies for companies is to start looking at their online competitors or resource sites in their industry to see what types of sites have been linking to their competitors.  This can give you a great sample of what has worked for them, and what you can leverage to work for you as well.  You can use a tool from SEOMoz called Open Site Explorer to do this competitive link profile research if you have never done this in the past.  Another tool to help track records over time is MajesticSEO’s backlink history tool.

majestic seo link building tool

There are also a number of other tools (most are paid) that can allow you to look at what websites link to your competitors.  If you have a favorite tool that isn’t OSE, feel free to leave a comment with that tool and what you like best about it.

Continue reading →

What exactly is a bad website & how do you fix it?

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On my way into work this morning, I passed a local computer repair shop and they have one of those messaging signs. This one said “we fix bad websites”.  Obviously that got my attention, but I am always on the lookout for such things as a marketing executive.  It did however get me to thinking, “what exactly is a ‘bad’ website?”

Is a bad website something that looks like it was built in 2001?  Is a bad website something that is so overwhelming with content that you “click off” the moment you get there because you don’t know where to start?  Is a bad website something that drives you no traffic on its own?  Is a bad website something that nobody can find unless they search for your company name?  Is a bad website something that makes you click 4 times before you get to what you want?  Is it when you go to visit examples of their work and they look old or in some cases you can’t FIND the references they give as “testimonials or case studies”?  Just what does a “bad website” mean and look like?

Continue reading →

Analyzing your audience’s web habits to improve website performance

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How much actionable information do you have about your web visitors? Can you predict their wants, goals, needs and behavior? Are you using analytic data to improve website performance? Do you utilize any re-targeting, ad networks, Search Engine Marketing (PPC and Display) and social media to be collecting data across multiple external sites and clickstreams? If so, the potential to deliver targeted content and offers based on their previous behavior and referring traffic source is possible.

You can construct detailed matrix that serve up content based on the family of sites they have visited and the predicted traits and interests that visitors to those sites demonstrate. However, if the first known point of contact with your visitors is their arrival at your site, then predicting their targeted area of interest is a much more tricky proposition, unless you study your own analytics and data (Sitecore, Webtrends, Quantcast, Google Analytics, etc) to come up with them and improve website performance.

Do you perform any A/B testing of two broader offers or content paths on your enterprise level site visitors and see which performs better (ie they look at more pages or end up as a conversion more often).  That is a good place to start, but more organizations have never consider split testing their own website. Doing this would ensure no audience gets excluded or misdirected–and it requires less historical data to drive the offer but allows you to profile how each “path” behaves.

Coming from purchased media like PPC or Facebook, can also shed light into keywords that have “special” needs to be effective, landing pages that get them to take desired actions and demographic profiles of who is visiting based on reporting. Again, this allows you the create a profile on each type of visitor and adjust the “path” accordingly – which will improve website performance .

You tie all of this data together to make the necessary changes to your website and content, navigation paths to drive more usability, click patterns, desired “conversions” that you have established for your website and/or campaigns.  Interpreting data is extremely important to ongoing web success – find a resource to work with that understands this to help set benchmarks and foundational strategy and it will help educate yourself and give you insights to things you could use across all mediums with your marketing and advertising.

Social Media Strategy – trigger interaction & response

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You do not have to be consumer oriented company to be able to use social media to advance your Brand, thoughts, products, and engagement with your audience. There are plenty of people professionally that look for helpful information for their jobs and will share valuable information with their peers when they find it. It some cases, it is even “cool” to be the first to find a great deal or share relevant information for others.

In the B2B world, you can also help aggregate content for your customers, clients, and prospects, by being a filter for them. You can share relevant information with them that has already “passed” your approval or relevance rating. This becomes almost like a value added service for them. They turn to you, a trusted resource first, before they go hunting on the Internet. You want them to say – “if they haven’t said anything about it yet, then I probably don’t need to pay attention to it yet.” And any savvy Internet person can tell you that just because it comes up “first” on Google, doesn’t make it accurate or right.

If you can get your people to interact with you, you can get valuable information about their habits, wants, desires, and interests. If you can get them to follow you or be involved, you can help your message get in front of thousands with a single click or post because it will not only reach your direct followers, but also post to their network of people because they are following you.

You can choose to have different message via each social medium (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, etc), or choose to broadcast your message, which will allow your audience to follow you via the medium they like to use the most and you still get your message out to the masses without requiring them to visitor you website. That is power and potentially all from a single article or click.

If you don’t know where to start or what you should be doing we have several tools on our website to help and we have created an great tool for measuring social media success and value of social media efforts to your organization. This will help you determine which social media efforts should be continued by your organization and give you some ways to help measure return-on-investment.

Seven Steps for Social Media Strategy Integration for your Company

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I love this article from last summer about the 52 questions to ask when hiring a social media company. This article is spot on if you are serious about Social Media. It goes way in depth in some cases, especially for Small-to-Medium enterprises, but it does a good job in helping you determine what you should be asking a potential partner.

After talking to, working with and pitching dozens of companies and organizations on the principles of social media and why it works for more than just Business-to-Consumer Brands, I have realized that it is a much bigger commitment than just “another marketing or advertising campaign” of sorts.

Here is what you need to do to make sure your social media efforts get the Return-On-Investment (ROI) they could and also why playing around doesn’t really drive effective social media. All of these things really depend on who has what responsibilities within your organization and how it is structured but most are applicable in the larger, national and even global size companies. Even smaller organizations can take away some value as well.

First - Your various business units or divisions and partners should be all be looped in and asked if they participate in social media and how. They should all be informed somehow of what you are doing and why even potentially consulted on how they could improve their social media initiatives so you can have some Brand continuity across all of your channels.

Second - You need to look at your audience structure. Don’t be thinking that a “catch all” corporate Facebook page or blog is enough. People are smarter than that. Speak specifically to them, with content that is what they want – be specific in touching all your audience with content and experiences they can relate to. Don’t make it a “news” page. If you are updating them with content they don’t care about half of the time, they will start to ignore it ALL of the time and that is bad. If you have the resources and a large enough market share, you could consider “several” Blogs(or add filters when they follow so they can select what information they want) and multiple Facebook pages for segments that are big enough to warrant them and truly create a dialog/interaction with a specific customer base.

Third - You have to have some buy-in at the C-level. They should be involved in whats going on and even use them to help aggregate industry news, company news, white papers, blog postings, etc. It is important to help them buy into goals that established and measurement of success – in effect the ROI you want. This might also help you navigate any potential objections from “legal”. Speaking of legal, if you do use a third party source, make sure they can work with someone like Bevelwise to ensure no proverbial “lines” get crossed and they feel like you could get into any “trouble” resulting in ligitgation.

Fourth - offer out incentives of some sort to employees to touch customers (sales, customer service, customer care/support, etc) to help feed you good stories, testimonials, content, and things that make good social media posts. Anyone who touches a client could help generate content and drive the initiatives further – A customer service person that asks “are you following us on Facebook yet – we have specials we run for those fans on occasion” can go a long way to helping build your presence. These people can also get you content for posting MUCH faster and more often than most.

Fifth - all of your web resources, teams, should know what is going on and why. They don’t have to “agree” with it always, but aligning what is happening with the website (SEO/Content) resources, all of your marketing/advertising campaigns (email, online, offline, direct mail, etc) and initiatives and your PR team will help feed you more content and help the “big picture” work together. After all, if you are putting effort in, you want to maximize each effort.

Sixth - If you are big enough, try to find a champion from each internal department, especially those that touch customers, so they can farm for content, feedback and other things you can share through your social media channels. They can work with your social media agency or potentially be trained on making posts – You want to make sure you are feeding the content to touch all of your vertical markets, products, services, audiences etc-especially if you have the resources or need for content specific social media. Internal folks live and breathe your strategy 24/7 – they can be VERY beneficial to an outside resource because of that.

Finally - if you are choosing a partner to help, choose a partner that has understanding across all marketing mediums, but with a specialty in the online channels like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), website usability, online marketing – (banners/PPC, e-mail marketing, and especially analytics. That should mean they know how to set up goals and measure results across the many different channels and mediums that are being used for your overall advertising strategy.

We welcome your social media strategy questions.

Extra parked or redirect domains don’t show up in search engines

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Extra or redirect domains that redirect to a different “primary” domain do not help you by showing up in search engine results.  For example, if Bevelwise were to own the domain websitemarketinggrandrapids.com which is full of keywords and redirect that domain’s traffic to bevelwise.com it would not help us in search engine rankings at all.  If someone were to look for the domain websitemarketinggrandrapids.com in Google, it wouldn’t be found.

If search engines were to see this extra domain and try to index it, they would see that there is not any content on this domain, it just redirects to a different website.  Therefore, it has no search engine value and the search engines will completely ignore it.

Back in the earlier days of the internet, people used to type in the address bar a keyword and add “.com” to try to find something.  For example, someone who wanted to buy office furniture might type in “officefurniture.com” and hope they are taken to a legitimate website.  People who wanted to capture this traffic would purchase these domain names and put up websites or redirect this traffic to a different site. This is sometimes called “blind” searching and it is very rare to find people doing this today.  Search engines have  removed the need to do blind searching.

There are a few reasons to have and keep these extra domains.  The primary reason is to ensure that no one else (like your competitor) buys the domain.  That is a very good reason why you would want to buy the “.net” and “.org” version of your primary domain, you wouldn’t want your competitors to have those domains.

The other reason to have extra redirect domains is to capture the traffic of common misspellings of your primary domain name.  For example, Google owns the domain gogle.com and if you go to that address it redirects people to the primary domain of google.com.

Outside of the two above reasons, we do not recommend to purchase additional or extra domain names unless you intend to create unique websites for those domains.

As we begin 2011, thanks to everyone…

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There are several things when you run a small services company that come into play. Good staff, good clients, and always a little luck. As a marketing firm, with heavy emphasis in the web marketing, search optimization, and online media fields that are highly competitive, you have to always be on the top of your game. For example, there is typically more than change per day (550+ in 2009) to how Google ranks sites, not to mention Bing and other factors. This “whole Internet thing” takes a lot more attention by the qualified people to do it and it will help maximize results because web is open 24/7. You also need to make sure you are not taking short cuts and you are building for long term as much as short term because long term will get you further for the money over time.

You also need to be able to create and implement marketing and web strategy you can measure and helps people establish and get to their goals. If you are not doing these and marketing effectively, then you are not maximizing your budget and return on investment. It isn’t about showing some results and saying “look at what we’ve done”. We find it extremely easy (with about 80% of our prospects) to have the ability to increase their marketing response by 10% or web hits by 33% just through implementing best practices and optimization of all media, but you have to look deeper than that. It’s more about using what we learned making those initial improvements and what we are going to do to get you to the next level of results. At some point, you will reach diminishing returns, but knowing when you shouldn’t spend the money to try for it is crucial to maximizing each and every piece of your marketing matrix and that is where we shine.

If you look at all the pieces of marketing as illustrated by these two graphics, one will see that the interactive or digital marketing picture alone has the same amount of moving parts as an entire strategy used to just 12-15 years ago. That in itself makes once have to pay attention to it to keep your business moving forward.

What we do is help get and keep businesses moving forward through building communities with their audiences and making sure their interactions with their customers and prospects gives them the best chance for success. I wanted to take a moment as we begin a new year to thank my wonderful staff for all their hard work and dedication, all of our great clients for believing in what we were telling them and trusting in our execution (even when they didn’t fully understand it) and just say that Bevelwise is nothing without both of you. Here’s to a great 2010 and hopefully an even better 2011.